case study: a practice-based perspective on participatory prototyping

In this post, I'm going to use ideas from a project bid that was passed over for funding as the basis of a case study for the merits of a practice-based perspective for participatory prototyping around issues of climate adaptation in urban settings.

Part 1: Prototyping

Participatory prototyping is a pretty obvious approach for an organisation doing product, service or UX design. However, in my experience, it's not quite so obvious or accepted a choice at the more nuts-and-bolts end of civic governance. This is where I feel a practice-based perspective is useful: not only does it make designing the prototyping process easier, it also helps to make the case for doing it in the first place.

Let's say you're in the department of a medium-sized northern European city (cough, cough) whose job is to manage and maintain public space; that means you're probably also in charge of dealing with the implications of various directives and programmes aimed at mitigating and/or adapting to the consequences of climate change. You know these concerns to be real, and so do the executive layer, at least in theory; in practice, resources are available for climate adaptation in a manner strongly shaped by the current economic and political circumstances. (More plainly, you're likely being asked to do a lot with a tiny budget topped up with whatever grant money you can scare up.)

One of the issues on your slate is the predicted prospect of longer periods of hotter weather in the years ahead. The exact timeline of any given increase in temperature is uncertain, but the increase itself is not; it might be twenty years, it might be five, but it's coming, and based on recent summers, you're thinking it might be best to assume it's coming sooner rather than later. This means you need to be thinking about how to adapt street furnishings and public transport provision, and thereby to intervene in the ways in which your citizens engage in what we might broadly think of as "mobility activities": getting around the place, in other words, when it's baking hot.

So, you've got climate adaptation challenges threaded through your duty to citizens, meaning you need to plan for interventions that you can roll out fairly quickly for minimal cost. What changes should you make?

You're quite fortunate that there's plenty of precedent to draw upon. The advantage of your northerly location is that there are plenty of cities to the south of you where higher temperatures are a more familiar experience, so you can look there—and further afield—for tactics you might want to try.

But you're also mindful of the plentiful stories of adaptations to streets and transit that have flopped, whether through going underutilised, going entirely unused, or even being actively resisted. Sometimes, it seems, people just don't know what's good for them!

The thing is, people do know what's good for them. The problems tend to arise from approaching the problem with a behaviourist mindset that frames citizens as "consumers" of services; if you've heard decision-makers talking about "behaviour change", for instance, then that's the the framework in play.

(In the public sector, the governmental paradigm once known and celebrated as New Public Management is largely responsible for this perspective. This is all the more ironic, given that almost everyone in the public sector, not to mention academia, believes NPM to have been a well-intentioned but ultimately very damaging way of looking at things. However, NPM is probably baked into a lot of the systems you're obliged to work within, which is why you need to be able to make a good case for doing things differently.)

The fact of the matter is, the ways that people move through the city and make use of public space is not predominantly rational, and their choices are not always made with an eye to the optimal. Rational decisions are part of the equation, certainly—but a smaller part than you might expect. For the majority of people, choices are constrained by circumstance, by external factors both obvious and obscure.

That's why, if you want to make changes that have a decent chance of sticking, you need to be thinking in terms not of "behaviour", as if your citizens were rats in B F Skinner's laboratory, but rather in terms of practices. Participatory prototyping methods can help you to do this, and in the third part of this essay, I'll outline an example project based on a recent bid that didn't quite make the cut for funding. But first, I'm going to set out the basics of the practice-based perspective.

Part 2: Practices

I will dig into the detail and origins of this framework in a later essay. For now, I'm just going to say that it's rooted in the work of Elizabeth Shove and the Social Practices Research Group at Lancaster University, which draws in turn on the social philosophy of thinkers such as Ted Schatzki. There's plenty of literature out there, but it can be a little too academic for easy access—and that's one reason for me writing about it here.

Market-based behaviourism got us into the mess of climate change; it can't get us out of it. The practice perspective is not just a different way of thinking about human activity, but a useful one, especially in the context of a historical moment in which we need to change the ways in which we live. I've said it before, and I'll say it again:

You stand next to no chance of changing the way someone does something until you understand why they do that thing in the way that they already do it.

So, with that in mind, here's a very simple version of social practice theory. Any given practice is formed of three aspects or elements: affordances, competencies, and meanings.

• Affordances refer to the material tools and devices and systems which are available to the practitioner in the course of fulfilling a particular goal. Say our practitioner's goal is to get from their home to the big shopping center a few dozen kilometers outside of the town where they live. It's quite likely they have a bunch of different affordances they might make use of: a bicycle, a car, a bus line. (Note: the SPRG used the term "infrastructures" instead of affordances; I will explain my choice to use a different term in a later essay.)
• Competencies refer to the practitioner's ability to make use of the affordances that are available to them. Competencies include what we might think of as skills: learning to drive a car or ride a bike, for instance, but also learning to read and navigate a public transport system. But competencies may also be physical, and they can be negative as well as positive: making use of public transport is not so easy for a person who needs to use a wheelchair, for instance, and a standard pushbike might well be a (quite literally) insurmountable challenge.
• Meanings refer to the deep-seated (and rarely entirely rational) values we ascribe to a particular practice: to its goal or objective, but also to the way in which we do it. Regarding the latter, I'd be very surprised if you've never heard someone say, on being asked why they do a particular thing in a particular way, "that's just how we've always done it"; social norms and traditions (and, to some extent, trends and fashions) influence the things we do and the ways we do them, and deeply entrenched practices seem particularly obdurate: if your parents (and maybe even your grandparents!) did something a particular way for your entire upbringing, then you've probably got a strong sense of that being the "right" way to do it. But meanings are entangled with the goals themselves, too, and can involve norms and traditions that extend beyond the personal and familial.

For example: ask someone why they commute by car to their job, and they might say that they just always have done, ever since they learned to drive around the time they finished school. Ask why they don't use public transport or a bike instead, and they might say that they mustn't be late or arrive all sweaty and dishevelled, that the busses tend to get stuck in traffic during rush-hour, and that it's dangerous to cycle at that time of day. Ask them why they need to be at the office for 8am, and you'll reach the point where they start to look at you like you're an idiot; they have to be there then because that's when work starts! That's the way we've always done it—and the "we" here is far bigger than this person or the company they work for, or even the country where they live.

Even if we assume that traditions around office hours and workplace presenteeism are inviolate—which we shouldn't!—meanings are embedded in everything we do, as are competencies and affordances; crucially, the three elements are always entangled with each other, too. The dominant relationship between affordances and competencies is presumably obvious: you have to know how to use a thing to use it successfully and safely, and you have to have access to a thing in order to learn how to use it. But there's a lot more nuance in there when you start looking at specific cases... and those nuances are often where meanings interact with and de-rationalise relationships which may seem at first glance to be a simple matter of "stuff and skills".

With apologies for belabouring the point, this is why behaviourist interventions tend to fail, despite the best intentions of their designers. Such approaches tend to work on the assumption that by simply providing the "better" (e.g. more environmentally sustainable, or safer) affordance, and perhaps providing some instructive messages, people will make the rational choice and use that "better" option. But often they don't—because their choice is not a rational calculation made in unconstrained circumstances.

So, returning to our case study: if you want to intervene in public space and public transport, you need to know why they're using those spaces and modes of travel in the way they're using them now. It's never simply a matter of utility.

You also need to trust that they're capable of thinking about how they might do it differently.

Part 3: Participation

With the best will in the world, trying to understand why people do things the way they do them without asking them about it is destined to fail. Our choices are obvious to ourselves, and we assume that the choices of others are obvious, too—or at least that they should be obvious. Hence our bafflement at people who do things differently.

The same issue extends to making changes for other people's benefit: we assume that we know what's best for other people, because we know what's best for ourselves. But often we haven't examined our own choices and actions in detail, either; they're just normal, after all. That's how you've always done it!

People from the fields of participatory arts and placemaking have a saying I'm very fond of:

"People are experts in their own lives".

Participatory prototyping taps into a vast trove of expertise that is all too often overlooked. What does the average citizen know about street landscaping, or public transit planning? Not much, you might think—but they know a whole lot about using it, about when it's useful and when it's not.

That knowledge is not exactly rational, and may not even be verbal; until you ask someone about the composition of a practice—about why they do that thing, and why they do it that particular way—they may never have even thought to put it into words.

But that knowledge is situated and embodied: it is highly specific to a particular place (and probably to particular times, too), and it is made and held and enacted through physical action.

So, how might you try to tap into that expertise, in order to start thinking about your hot city problems? What follows is a very bare sketch, and it should be obvious you'll need a bunch of different skills to bring it together: research and analysis, facilitation and workshop design, project management—and, of course, some worldbuilding! The costs will depend on the scale of the project, on your access to skills in-house and/or connections with collaborators... but the basic elements would apply as much to a small pilot as to a more sustained project.

• You need to start with some basic worlding. In the case of heat mitigation, that means getting the best data you can about predicted temperature levels, and picking a set of sites that are exemplary of the different types of urban fabric and space use in the city. It's very important to do this sort of work in real spaces, rather than idealised ones, because there are no ideal spaces in the world—just as there are no ideal practices, only practices of best fit.
• You need to enrol citizen participants, aiming for as representative a demographic spread as you can, and drawing in particular on people with a strong connection to the particular spaces you're going to work with. (In practice, enrolment will always fall short of a representative ideal; this sucks, and it is invariably the more marginal communities and identities who end up underrepresented, but it's better to try and fall short than not to try at all. This is not at all my area of expertise, but I'm given to understand that drawing upon existing connections with community leaders is a good strategy here.)
• If there's time and budget available, you may want to spend some time asking questions about people's present use of public space and public transport, listening closely, and trying to tease out the elements that form their particular practices. Again: you'll do much better in an attempt to change the way people do things if you understand why it is they're doing them the way they already are! If people are willing to be observed in the course of their practices, even better: go full ethnographer on it, follow along and ask questions. Yes, this will require a fair amount of time with a skilled ethnographer, but I would argue that even half a dozen close narratives from people who exemplify different categories of citizen—commuters, teenagers, seniors, parents of young children, people with disabilities, etc etc—will provide you with the sort of rich detail (or what we sociological types call "thick description") that no amount of anonymised surveys ever could. The opportunity to explore even a few practices at the level of meanings is incredibly valuable.
• Then it's time to do some prototyping! In this particular case, I think it would be a very good idea to have collected a bunch of the precedents for adaptation from other cities elsewhere, as mentioned above. Get your participants into the space where their embodied and situated knowledge is activated, present them with a possible change in the environment, then ask how they would go about things differently, and what changes to the space might make certain options or choices more viable.

The prototyping process should be as fun as you can make it—though that can be a hard sell to decision-makers, because there is an assumption that what is fun is frivolous. The counterargument would be that play is how we learn—and the embodied, physical play of a prototyping workshop not only activates that embodied knowledge, but also gets around any anxiety that participants might have about being unable to communicate their ideas in words alone. Experienced workshop designers and facilitators are worth their weight in gold: bringing to life the world you began to build at the start of the process, and getting your participants to step over the imaginary threshold, is crucial.

In my opinion you should allow—indeed, even encourage—the creation of wild, weird prototypes. (Young participants are particularly useful on this front, as they're often more willing to make suggestions that adults would dismiss.) The point of this process is not to end up with "shovel-ready" interventions that can be acted upon immediately! Sad to say, the process of stripping away anything radical or different is going to begin as soon as you take your findings back to your department, when the engineers and the accountants and the executives first encounter them. The more weirdness and wildness you have in the pile to start with, the more likely it is that some of it will survive the systemic stifling of novelty which is the hallmark of NPM.

(There will quite likely be at least one moderately radical idea that emerges during the process—an idea that gains a surprising and enthusiastic degree of support from the participants, an idea that you can feel has real potential. Choosing quietly to defend that one idea, and having a bunch of wilder ideas to sacrifice to the spreadsheet demons in the course of that defence, may be a strategy to consider in these final stages of reintegrating the findings into your organisation. I can't promise you it will work, sadly—indeed, you may find that even the more modest ideas are rejected as too difficult, too expensive, or politically inexpedient. But the more troops you have to send into that battle, the greater the odds that one or two will make it to the far side of the chessboard.)

In no small part, this post has been a way to feel that something of lasting value came out of the work I contributed recently to a bid that didn't make the cut for funding. The bid in question was a consortium, and so I'm not using much of the specific detail; I wanted to show how I would approach a given theme or question while working with a range of different collaborators, and how that approach (and the methods specific to it) are informed and supported by a practice-based perspective.

I will write more about social practice theory at a later date. It was a huge part of my doctoral research on infrastructural reconfiguration and sociotechnical change, it has informed my approach to futuring ever since, and I would like it to be more widely understood—so I figure it falls to me to be the change I want to see!

In the meantime, if you would like some support with thinking through a project or bid related to climate adaptation, where the "normal" approach would be to frame things in terms of "behaviour modification", I would love to help out! Please drop me a line, and we'll make some time for a call.

Thanks for reading.